 |
| It would seem that the Nats don't understand what the word empathy means, or racism, or honesty for that matter. |
National's new draconian Oranga Tamariki welfare reforms are anti-Māori, anti-women and anti-human
Martyn 'Bomber' Bradbury.
"It's difficult to know where to begin in attempting to sift the outright spite and maliciousness of National's new welfare reforms. Firstly, let's just acknowledge that while National say beneficiary and gangs, their angry voters hear Māori.
Let's also acknowledge that these reforms are anti-Māori, anti-women and anti-human because they won't in any way shape or form help those requiring welfare, they will only exacerbate poverty and cause a myriad of counter productive outcomes.
Punishing anyone in a gang (and their affiliates) with cutting off welfare simply pushes those people deeper into gang life.
Punishing mothers who don't provide the name of the father simply hurts the children of those families.
Punishing mothers for not vaccinating their children avoids the obligations the health system has for reaching out to those communities.
But most egregious of all is the idea that National wants every beneficiary house with children in them that tests positive for meth to have their details passed along to Oranga Tamariki for investigation for possible uplift.
The audacity of National suggesting this after the state house meth testing hysteria that saw $120million needlessly spent for decontamination that was never scientifically harmful and saw hundreds of beneficiaries kicked out onto the street in the middle of a homelessness crisis is enough to make you gasp.
Not content to ignore their past failure on this issue, National now want to give Oranga Tamariki, an organisation already detested for their racist profiling uplift techniques, to now have the power to remove children on nothing more than a flawed meth testing regime?
Remember, the tests can't tell when the meth was smoked or who smoked it.
You want Oranga Tamariki to have that level of unchecked power on top of their already unchecked powers?
National should be shamed for these cruel policy ideas. How dare they attempt to implement this spite as social policy.
So where to from here, for the thousands of decent folk who have supported National, through thick and thin times...through Muldonism, through Keyism and so on. Alas right at this minute they must feel directionless and lost in their search for the high moral ground that the present leadership has whipped out from under their feet. Just because Paula Bennett has lost a bit of weight and spends hours under a sun lamp, doesn't mean that she has changed from being a law breaker when she revealed personal private information about beneficiaries private data...sadly unlike Winston Peters they never had the money to sue her like Peters is doing in the high court right now!.
In the UK the tories and their public servants have been shown to by massive fraud: check this out:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/06/government-universal-credit-deception-asa-taxpayer-funded-features
` The person who sent me the above stated and I quote: "Not just elected officials but the bureaucracy is rotten". And he is correct and I'm sure you will agree after reading about the Tory Governments lies over welfare in the UK.
In many respects the same is happening here in NZ, the bureaucracy here too is wedded to the Roger Douglas mode...slowly but surely the Labour Party is divesting itself of the corrupt days of Douglas and Prebble. But after all these years it would seem that the present PM is making it a task to remove the ingrained neoliberal behaviour that still remains in both the financial arena and the general political scene. There is still a longway to go...but the neolibs are slowly but surely departing the scene. ANZ banking values have dropped to low levels since their appointment of Key as a key player in the banking sector. Quitting ANZ may be a wise step in the right direction.
Palmerston North readers may have noticed the effort of local texter 'PAM' who loves all things National, text about the make up of the PNCC Councillors, Red and green she calls them, and she fears that they may effect 'Farmers'. Gee whiz that surely is a strange statement. She Pam that is, calls farmers hard working! and attempts to create the impression that other workers are not hard working. Nurses, Teachers, Bus drivers, Shop assistants are all bloody hard working and they don't get bailed out whenever their incomes are effected by market changes. She never texts about Nationals promise not to increase taxes then they raised GST. She has a very limited memory of history.
And with Trump on the verge of impeachment the collasp of some super-right dictatorships around the world may indicate a sign of things to come. It is now being reported that 49% of US voters support impeachment of Trump...and in recent local and state election prove that Americans are starting to see the light and dumping Republicans at a rapid rate, if the US election rules can be made fair, all votes may get to be counted.
https://truthout.org/articles/donald-trump-lost-tuesdays-elections/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=289408d3-13a7-41fb-8a4c-c89fddc336bb
here is what Trump said before the elections on the 5th of November: "
“If you lose,” Trump implored the crowd with hands lifted in supplication, “it sends a really bad message, just sends a bad, and they will build it up. Here’s the story: If you win, they’re gonna make it like ‘ho-hum,’ and if you lose, they’re going to say ‘Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. This was the greatest.’ You can’t let that happen to me!”
Finally let me present you with ACTION Stations effort to effect local government elections:
Tēnā koe Peter,
So far more than 900 members of the ActionStation community have told us how to fix local elections and enhance local democracy.
Will you join them?
So far people have told us:
“We need more
easily accessible and engaging information about candidates and issues.” -
Corinne
“One person in
every whānau should take responsibility for encouraging whānau to vote.” -
Wikitoria
“We need a public
holiday on voting days.” - Jake
But what do you think? The survey will close on Monday 11 November at 5pm.
I look forward to reading what you have to say!
Ngā mihi,
Laura for the ActionStation team
The email I sent on Sunday is below:
Kia ora Peter,
To vote in the local elections, I cast a special vote at a very packed Porirua City Council on Saturday 12 October at 11.50am, just 10 minutes before the cut-off time. I had to do this after I didn’t receive my voting papers in the post, among a myriad of life and work admin.
I had arrived at 11:15am and was number 34 in line. Most of the people waiting to special vote were Māori, young or Pasifika. There were only two or three staff collecting special votes.
Some people saw the line and gave up because they’re people with busy lives, families to look after, kids to take to sports, groceries to buy. I managed to vote with ten minutes to spare, but I’m not sure about the folks behind me.
I left feeling like the user experience of local democracy is broken.
Right now, our staff team are in the thick of evaluating our local election campaign and brainstorming new approaches to local politics. In two weeks time, we’ll be making big strategic decisions about how we approach local organising and local government.
In 2014, we organised parties where the only way a person could get a ticket was if they enrolled and made a promise to vote. The promise consisted of them giving us their name, email, phone number and ticking a box that said, ‘I promise to vote’. We weren’t trying to get people to vote for any particular party, just get the voting habit started. Research shows if you start voting young, you’ll keep doing it and if you don’t, you won’t, which is why our work is important. Democracy works best when everyone participates.
Thousands of people attended those parties. Volunteers called every person afterwards to help get them the information they needed to vote. Often we’d be asked questions like, ‘How do I enrol?’ ‘What is the difference between an electorate and party vote?’ At other times we’d have conversations where people would say things like, ‘I’m passionate about ending child poverty but I don’t know which policies work best for solving the problem’.
We’d point people to non-partisan and credible sources like On The Fence, or organisations who work on the kaupapa they care about. We’d do this because one of the reasons young people don’t vote is because they don’t have enough information, or they have so much that they don’t know what or who to trust.
In 2017, we partnered with the cosmetics company Lush to encourage their young customers to vote. Staff would initiate conversations about the importance of voting and we had an in-store poll on an iPad where people were encouraged (again) to give us their name, email, and phone number but also to vote on what issue they cared about most, and who should be the prime minister. Beyond beat ups on Gareth Morgan, Winston Peters and David Seymour as preferred PM. We then organised volunteers to individually text everyone who engaged with our poll to help them make a plan to vote.
RockEnrol’s work has always been about combining sizzle (parties, influencers, popular culture) with steak (grassroots community organising) to unleash the political power of young people. We believe in igniting and facilitating political conversations to give young people time and space to consider and inform their voting decisions.
In 2019, RockEnrol ran our first ever local election campaign focussed on getting more young Aucklanders to vote. We co-hosted two pop-up one-stop-shops where people could enrol and vote at the same time. Hordes of young people turned up. Watching those events, I couldn’t help but think that the future of voting is social, not postal.
I’d love to hear what you think the future of local democracy is. Take our quick survey here.
Postal voting leaves young and marginalised people out because they move house more often than older Pākehā homeowners. Most young people can’t afford their own homes so they are beholden to the whims of (older) landlords, meaning they have to move around more and do a disproportionate amount of work just to stay enrolled.
People often jump to online voting as a silver bullet solution, but I’m not convinced. Tech experts say it isn’t safe and it doesn’t address the inequities that lead to lower voter participation rates in the first place. Of the young people who don’t vote, it is those who are also Māori, Pasifika, recent migrants, disabled, or from low education, low income or rural backgrounds who are the least likely to vote. Online voting won’t fix the discrimination and exclusion so many of these folks face. Making voting social, multi-lingual, easy and accessible will.
The future of local democracy needs to be resourced properly by central government so that people can have their say in real-life in the community. The final day for voting needs to run all day, not just until noon and one-stop-shops or voting booths have to become the norm. Assisted voting should also be resourced so folks with disabilities can vote more easily.
Equality researcher Max Rashbrooke wrote a paper called Bridges Both Ways which presented the idea of a ‘Kōrero Politics Day’.1 His pitch is that six or so weeks out from every general election, we should have a national public holiday with well-funded community events that combine music, art, politics, and other gatherings designed to foster civic discussion. This would underline the importance of politics, give people time and space to think about issues, and encourage a more reflective citizenship.
I love this idea (and I love a public holiday) and I think it would work well for local elections too. It would give organisations and communities a rallying point to come together around and it would strengthen relationships in the community. But what do you think?
Tell us what ActionStation should prioritise in local politics.
A friend told me that back in the day her Nana and their whānau would purchase one copy of the newspaper for the whole marae to discuss and debate, and when it came to elections they would get dressed up and travel to the polls to vote as a hapori (community).
We should be inspired by this, smashing all of the barriers to participation to make voting as community-oriented as possible. We have the potential, what we need now is people in power with the political will to make it happen.
Click here to take our survey on local democracy.
Ngā mihi nui,
Laura, for the ActionStation team
No comments:
Post a Comment